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Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

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Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#291

Post by chairmansteve »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #226
nostrademons wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that it's replacing one form of activity with a cheaper one, it's that it removes the transaction . Which means that now there's nothing to tax, and nothing to measure. As far as GDP is concerned, economic activity will have gone down, even though the same work is being accomplished differently.

This sounds in awful lot like a cousin of the broken window fallacy. The fallacy being that when a careless kid breaks a window of a store, that we should celebrate because the glazier now has been paid to come out and do a job. Economic activity has increased by one measure! Should we go around breaking windows? Of course not.

If we want to increase GDP, we should.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#292

Post by lotsofpulp »

ac29 wrote: post #288
lotsofpulp wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have doubts on the quality and how automated a 1930s restaurant could have been.

They are talking about automating the serving process, not the cooking process. Specifically, you can read about Automats, which were basically early vending machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat

I don’t understand how this could materially reduce costs compared to current restaurants where you order on the screen and pick up your tray at the counter when your name/number is called.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#293

Post by chairmansteve »

trinsic2 wrote: post #243
nostrademons wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It very much is a cousin of the broken window fallacy. Bastiat's original point of the Parable of the Broken Window could be summed up by the aphorism "not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts". It's a caution to society to avoid relying too much on metrics, and to realize that sometimes positive metrics obscure actual negative outcomes in society. It's very similar to…

Very thought out reply on the nuances around this. Thanks for generating insight on this topic. I think our society is being broken by focusing too much on metrics. Also the idea of breaking windows to generate more income reminds me of the kind of services we have in modern society. It's like many of the larger encomic players focus on "things be broke", or "Breaking Things" to drive income which defeats the purpose…

"I think our society is being broken by focusing too much on metrics".

Maybe we should start with a set of principles?

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#294

Post by pessimizer »

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #166
XenophileJKO wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you value self expression? I literally mean creating music for MYSELF. I don't really care if anyone else "values" it. I like to listen to it and I enjoy spending an evening(or maybe 10 minutes if it is just a silly idea) to create a song. But this means my incentive to "buy" music is greatly decreased. This is the trend I think we'll see increasing in the near future. Examples: https://suno.com/s/0gnj4aGD4jgVcpqs…

I do value self expression, that’s why I play multiple instruments, paint, draw, sculpt. I don’t really see how prompting a machine to make music for you is self expression, even if it’s to your exact specifications.

You use instruments? Who would want to hear the voice of some mechanism when we have perfectly fine ones in our chests?

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#295

Post by danaris »

visarga wrote: post #113
Tepix wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also know from studies that it makes us less capable, i.e. it rots our brains.

Books also make us less capable at rote memorization. People used to do much more memorization. Search engines taught us to remember the keywords, not the facts. Calculators made us rarely do mental calculations. This is what happens - progress is also regress, you automate on one side and the skill gets atrophied on the other side, or replaced with meta-skills. How many of us know how to use machine code? And we cal…

Do books make us less capable of rote memorization?

Or do we just not take the effort to do the massive amounts of rote memorization that used to be necessary, now that we have books?

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#296

Post by iamacyborg »

grues-dinner wrote: post #285
iamacyborg wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think. You think wrong. This stuff is easy to measure and businesses spend billions in aggregate a month on this stuff. It’s provably effective and the details matter.

Do they though? Saturation bombing the Superbowl with Coinbase ads might be effective, but will it significantly change the conversion if a person in the background of the shot has a fuzzy leg that merges with a fire hydrant? Businesses presumably spend billions on things like office carpet too and very few of them care exactly what neutral-ish colour it is.

Yes, brands literally test creatives all the time.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#297

Post by franktankbank »

pizzly wrote: post #62

I think OP's thesis should be expanded. -AI is leading to cost optimizations for running existing companies, this will lead to less employment and potentially cheaper products. Less people employed temporary will change demand side economics, cheaper operating costs will reduce supply/cost side -The focus should not just be on LLM's (like in the article). I think LLMs have shown what artificial neural networks are ca…

Imagine a giant trawling net scooping up the last two-three decades undeprecated of work on the web/data/game/operating system space and cutting out the people who did all that work. What do you think is going to happen to the progression in those areas? I guess it was "done"? The LLM AI is only as good as its input, as far as I can tell there is no reason to believe any of its second order outputs. RLHF is an interesting plug for that hole but its only as good as the human feedback and even then those things taken to second order aren't going to be any good. This collapses the barrier to entry to existing products, aka those people are going to be swamped with new competition.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#298

Post by _DeadFred_ »

gloxkiqcza wrote: post #235
nostrademons wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that it's replacing one form of activity with a cheaper one, it's that it removes the transaction . Which means that now there's nothing to tax, and nothing to measure. As far as GDP is concerned, economic activity will have gone down, even though the same work is being accomplished differently.

If more value is being created more efficiently, in the end it’s just a question of coming up with taxation system designed for the new economy.

I don't see value being created. I see a hobbyist getting to spend time wrapping AI slop with a hobbyist level of game dev. Fun for OP, but society isn't asking for more games like this.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#299

Post by Retric »

brookst wrote: post #279
nostrademons wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that it's replacing one form of activity with a cheaper one, it's that it removes the transaction . Which means that now there's nothing to tax, and nothing to measure. As far as GDP is concerned, economic activity will have gone down, even though the same work is being accomplished differently.

As others have pointed out, this is a fallacy. By reducing costs in the supply chain, higher volumes of outputs are enabled. Nobody digs holes for for the sake of digging holes; by reducing costs and transaction volume at this layer, more businesses can afford to open and more money can be spent at higher value layers.

I think you’re missing their point. Many things create value that don’t get tracked by economic measurements. Cooking lunch for yourself creates value, but there’s no way to measure that in terms of GDP.

Subsidizing daycare vs stay at home parents isn’t necessarily a net win, but daycare and ordering takeout look like economic growth even if it’s net neutral. In that context a lot of economic growth over the last century disappears.

Thus AI could be neutral on economic measurements and still a net positive overall.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#300

Post by grues-dinner »

iamacyborg wrote: post #296
grues-dinner wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they though? Saturation bombing the Superbowl with Coinbase ads might be effective, but will it significantly change the conversion if a person in the background of the shot has a fuzzy leg that merges with a fire hydrant? Businesses presumably spend billions on things like office carpet too and very few of them care exactly what neutral-ish colour it is.

Yes, brands literally test creatives all the time.

And yet they'll also spend literally millions writing just the company name 100 times around the periphery of a sports field. That's not creative, that's just repetition.

On the graph of spend over the spectrum between that to a genuinely creative live-action advert that is actually memorable for being real (maybe the guy doing the splits between two Volvo™ lorries?) there is a lot of area representing of dross that can be replaced by minimal-input advertotron output. For example 100 million TVs and radios playing in the background while embedding the actual advertising payload of "did anyone say just eat?" into 100 million brains.

Come on, you must have seen a delivery food ad recently. Did the protagonist really have food in their hand or was it AI? What were they wearing? What model was the car in the background? Who cares, that wasn't the purpose of the ad.

Obviously if a creative is bring hired the hiring manager will want to have the best creative they can have for the same money and have the applicants compete with each other for it. But the company board would rather still just not employ that creative in the first place if all they're going to be doing is boilerplate forgettable delivery vehicles for the brand name and you can get 90% of the filler content for that to pop out of your enterprise tier adverts as a service subscription for $50 a month per user.

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